Fun in Undermine

Whatever gaming time hasn't gone into SWTOR's Galactic Season 8 over the past month, I pretty much spent on WoW's Undermine patch. Somewhat to my own surprise, I've been very focused on delves... but that's a post for another day I guess.

First I wanted to jot down some thoughts on Undermine the zone. It's an unusual one in so far as Blizzard have never created a patch zone before that consists entirely of a single city. Regardless of how one might feel about the goblin aesthetic, the main thing that has stood out to me about that is that it really requires you to learn the lay of the land in a way that isn't usually the case in regular overland zones. Normally you can tell quite easily what's a friendly hub, where hostile encampments are likely to pose greater danger, and what counts as an "in-between space" with average mob density. Undermine on the other hand is all town, all the time, and while the majority of it is fairly safe to traverse, there are definitely "bad" parts of town, where you'll be attacked on sight, and it was a real learning experience figuring out where that happens. (I hate The Heaps so much.)

Aside from that, there is no flying, which I'm sure was controversial with some but I didn't really mind. I quite appreciate an opportunity to get out a good old ground mount to be honest - and that is in fact how I get around most of the time, as I don't care for the zone's D.R.I.V.E. system at all. I don't drive in real life and I always thought racing games were boring, so giving me a race car was never likely to excite me. I was willing to give it a go, and I can put up with it for the occasional speed boost if I really want to get from one end of town to the complete opposite side, or when I want to take part in the surge pricing event, but the rest of the time I'm happy to just ride along on my old four-legger. This also saves me from constantly having to get in and out of the car every time I see something shiny to loot.

And there is a lot of that. You'd think that Undermine would be a dream come true for me in that regard, but to be honest I've actually found it to be somewhat overwhelming. I quite enjoy just cruising around and seeing what treasures and rares I encounter along the way, but the sheer number of them in all corners of Undermine actually kind of gives me sensory overload. This is also where the general layout of the buildings comes in to be annoying, with every house having multiple floors with narrow staircases and some buildings having points of interest on the outside as well, so it's not unusual to spend an exasperating amount of time legging it up and down multiple flights of stairs just to find that the mini map icon you were looking for is actually in another castle. There was also this one world quest on a roof somewhere that I just couldn't find access to, and when I finally googled it, it turned out I had to talk to an unassuming NPC for a free jetpack or something? I think back to how often I got turned around inside Northshire Abbey alone as a noob learning to navigate in a virtual 3D space for the first time, and I feel like to past me, Undermine would've been the stuff of nightmares.

Navigational obstacles aside, the zone is... pretty good. As someone who wasn't the biggest fan of goblins, I was sceptical, but it's fun enough. The story lived up to its promise of taking the goblins more seriously again without losing the humour, and I enjoyed seeing Xal'atath get mad (one good thing about my dislike for her is that when things don't go her way in the story, it's extremely satisfying). The music is great and I'm always humming along to the different tunes playing in various sub zones.

That said, I still prefer to "hang out" in the launch zones, probably because a lot of my "hanging out" consists of flying around and gathering, and Undermine doesn't have much to offer in that regard aside from a few stray gathering nodes inside the sewers (which to be honest is just another nuisance in itself, always having to locate the right sewer entrance to climb down to where you saw the ore node). Still, I've spent enough time there to max out the main faction's renown track, so there's that.

I also did one round of the Liberation of Undermine raid in LFR. Like last tier, the devs added a solo mode of the last fight again, and this time it was actually a required step to progress the main storyline instead of a side quest that was added later and easy to overlook. I was just baffled that it was still time-gated behind the regular raid. For all the ways Blizzard have slowly chipped away at raiding's unique incentives over time, they just can't seem to let go of "raiders must be the first ones to see the end of the story" for some reason, which is weird because I'll be very surprised if lore is high up on many modern WoW raiders' priority list.

Anyway, eventually the solo mode unlocked too. It was still a bit silly how the game didn't trust me to actually tank and slotted me into the NPC group as sucky dps, but it was a good opportunity to watch the ending cut scene in peace. Then I once again still wanted to do LFR to see the rest of the raid, and to be honest it was largely the same as usual, which is to say, not as bad as people sometimes say it is and well worth my while to see the story once, but I can't see myself investing the time in running it multiple times, even with the new raid renown track they added in this time. I'll just give an honorary shout-out to Stix Bunkjunker, who was probably the funniest raid boss I've ever seen in WoW, and my husband was quite amused while listening to my gleeful giggling and cackling throughout the entire fight.

All in all, Undermine delivered on its promise to give WoW players lots of new things to do, and apparently the next minor patch is already lined up to add a whole bunch of other new activities. There's no time to be bored in modern WoW.

Jason Schreier's "Play Nice"

Jason Schreier is a big name in gaming journalism, and when I first heard that he was going to publish a book about the history of Blizzard, I got quite excited. I would've even bought it on launch day, but then I found out that for some reason physical publication in the UK was delayed by something like two months, which kind of made me lose interest. I just watched/read some coverage of the book around the time of its release in the US and then mostly forgot about it again.

Until the other day that is, when it suddenly reappeared on my radar for some reason and I decided to finally pick it up. It was an enjoyable read, and I gave it four stars on Goodreads.

I especially appreciated the earlier chapters, because as someone who knew nothing about Blizzard before I started playing World of Warcraft, I always had very limited knowledge of the company's early years. I'd sometimes see people make comments about Blizzard North or Vivendi and have no real idea what they were talking about. Now I do, so in that regard, the book was very enlightening. The chapters about more recent developments were admittedly a lot less interesting, as they mostly covered events that I'd basically seen play out live on social media/in the news as they happened, and in greater detail than was covered in the book.

What really kind of disappointed me though was how little coverage there was about World of Warcraft. To be honest, the main reason I bought the book was that I was hoping for some juicy behind-the-scenes information about just why the devs made certain decisions in regards to the game's development over the years. What were they thinking when subscriptions stagnated during Wrath of the Lich King? What insights did they gain from players' responses to Cataclysm? Just why did Warlords of Draenor turn out the way it did? That sort of thing.

However, for some reason the game and its development got what I felt was very little coverage for something that's presumably been keeping the lights on at Blizzard for the last two decades. There's a chapter about its development and launch, and later there are a few pages dedicated to the release of Classic, but that's kind of it. Occasionally there'll be a reminder that WoW was still releasing expansions but that's as far as it goes, which really struck me as a big oversight.

One of the major themes of the book is the struggle between devs wanting to prioritise player enjoyment and corporate wanting to focus more on monetisation, and I figured WoW in particular would offer a lot of ground to cover on that topic. Talk about the release of the sparkle pony! The introduction of character boosts! The WoW Token! But nope, not a word about any of these things.

Considering the amount of random developers that get name-dropped throughout the book, it was also surprising that there wasn't even a mention of Ion Hazzikostas, considering how many years he's been at the helm of WoW by this point. Maybe he intentionally didn't want to be part of this book, but considering Jason's seeming lack of interest in WoW-related goings-on, I also wouldn't be surprised if he simply didn't consider talking to him.

In summary, "Play Nice" is a well-researched history of Blizzard and definitely relevant to anyone with an interest in Blizzard and/or the PC gaming industry, but for WoW players in specific, it's not as insightful as I would've expected.

I used to hope that Jason would write a similar book about Bioware one day so I could learn more about what happened behind the scenes of SWTOR's post-launch development, but at this rate it doesn't look like that subject would get much coverage even if such a book were to happen.

All Classes at 80!

This morning my mage hit level 80 from completing a delve, causing the achievement "Class Connoisseur" to pop up - for getting one of every class to max level. This is hardly an amazing feat nowadays, considering how fast and easy it is to level in retail, but I still felt quite a sense of accomplishment.

Back in my early days of WoWing, when I was at my most invested in the game, it wouldn't have been feasible for me to level up so many characters, as levelling was still quite time-consuming and you had to be really devoted to alting to have multiple max-level toons. When I reinstalled the game for Shadowlands, levelling was quick and I did ultimately level a few alts, but there wasn't much incentive for me to do this with a lot of different characters. It was only during Dragonflight that I got more invested again and started to bring more characters up in levels, which laid the foundation for me ultimately getting one of each class to 80 this expansion.

I wrote two previous posts about this process, which you can find here (in which I talked about playing evoker, warrior, priest and death knight) and here (for notes on hunter, druid, paladin, monk and rogue). This left warlock, demon hunter, mage and shaman for me to work on, which I'll talk about in this post.

Destruction Warlock

I've repeatedly stated in past posts that warlock is among my least favourite classes in WoW, and that the retail version of the class seems particularly confusing to me. The only reason I got this one levelled up was Mists of Pandaria Remix, and in a way it's no surprise that I left levelling her to 80 close to the end of my list. The class kit remained confusing to me the entire time, and a lot of my XP came just from flying around and picking flowers. More than once I died to regular mobs while doing this because I couldn't figure out what the heck I was doing.

And then I hit 80 and it was as if a switch had been flipped. I did the Awakening the Machine event and everything seemingly just exploded, regardless of which buttons I pressed. I one-shot normal mode Zek'vir with ease and even gave ?? a try as a warlock for a while. It was weird.

Of course, before I could get too invested, patch 11.1 came out, and even though officially only a single one of my talent points had been reset, I quickly noticed that several of my key abilities had disappeared, and I haven't felt motivated enough to do a deep dive to figure out whether that's due to more talent changes, intentional ability removal or what. I just know that warlock remains a bit of a weird one to me.

Havoc Demon Hunter

My demon hunter was actually my first max-level alt back in Shadowlands, but at some point my interest in playing her kind of dropped off. I do remember that there was a period during Dragonflight when the class felt annoyingly squishy out in the open world, but that was later remedied, and now every time I do play her I think "This is actually kind of fun; I don't know why I don't play this character more often" but then I immediately forget about her again. Maybe that's just an inevitable side effect of having so many alts, especially since I'm not too keen on melee dps. I've been playing my monk a lot more and I guess that covers all my melee needs for the time being.

Restoration Shaman

Considering that this was my "Remix main" and that resto shaman was super flavour of the month during War Within season one, I was kind of surprised by how much I did not feel like playing this character. I've levelled her now, but I still don't enjoy playing her a great deal for some reason. My best guess is that it's because in the (very) distant past I used to enjoy playing resto as melee while soloing, but that doesn't really seem possible anymore in the current game, so all you're left with is shooting a lot of lightning bolts and lava bursts, a play style I never enjoyed. But even while actually healing, the spell selection feels weirdly limited and clunky to me somehow; I don't know. There's probably something I'm missing here but I'm not sure I can be bothered to find out what it is.

Arcane Mage

Mage is one of the few classes where I've actually played as all three specs at some point in the past. I still tend to think of frost as my favourite spec, but when I revived this old character it turned out she was still specced arcane from around Wrath of the Lich King and I decided to just roll with it. The optimised arcane rotation is supposedly extremely complicated, but in everyday play I mostly press one button over and over, with the occasional addition of two others if they light up with a proc. I'm sure it would give some people hives to watch, but it's fun enough for me. I was actually kind of surprised that I ended up leaving this character until last but that's just how things panned out. We'll see whether she can earn herself a better spot in my roster this tier.

Musings on Goblins

War Within's latest patch, Undermine(d), is all about goblins. I like it well enough so far, but we'll see how it holds up in the long term. Either way, it's made me think about goblins a lot and how my perception of them has changed over time.

Looking at how goblins were presented in Vanilla, I always pictured them as natives of tropical islands. We originally encounter them in four different settlements, and aside from Everlook, they are all located on or near the beach of a zone with a warm climate. They seemingly like to cook with fish and clams a lot (the original artisan cooking quest is given by a goblin and rewards you with a stack of "Clamlette Surprise", plus there's that recipe for "Undermine Clam Chowder").

There are quite a few mentions of Undermine in the classic quests, but I've got to admit that despite the name, it never would've occurred to me that the place was underground. At the end of the quest chain from Booty Bay that has you collecting hides from increasingly dangerous crocolisks, the quest giver mentions that his creations will be on "the next boat to Undermine", so I always thought it was just an island.

In terms of their nature, vanilla goblins are portrayed as curious, enterprising and uninterested in the faction rivalries between Alliance and Horde. It's not surprising to find a random goblin out in the middle of nowhere, and if he's a vendor, you know he'll have something rare or interesting for sale. Their quests tend to be pretty straightforward fetch/kill quests, which may sound boring, but by the time you encounter most of these you'll be in higher-level territory where quests start to get more sparse and you're just grateful for something to do. Goblin NPCs often come across as a bit single-minded and greedy, but in a "good-natured scoundrel" sort of way, and they still care about other things too. Alchemist Pestlezugg warns both the Horde and the Alliance about the looming threat posed by the silithids for example, and Umi Rumplesnicker makes you travel all over Kalimdor just to play a prank on her friends.

And then Cataclysm came out and everything was different. I went through the blog's archives to find what I had to say about the goblin starter zone when it first came out and only found this post from 2011, in which I stated: "Those zones seem to be the kind of content that people either love or hate, and unfortunately my reaction fell on the negative side of the spectrum. Kezan and the Lost Isles just felt nothing like the Azeroth I used to know, and while I can generally appreciate pop culture references and the like, the goblins went overboard with it in my opinion."

I actually never rolled another goblin after that, so I thought I'd use the occasion of patch 11.1 to revisit Kezan and the Lost Isles just to see how I'd feel about them one and a half decades later. Now, I didn't hate the experience at first, but it still felt very weird. I just told you how I perceived the goblins in Vanilla, right? Well, come Cataclysm they are suddenly polluting hyper-capitalists whose every sentence is some sort of anachronistic joke. The very first quest has you going around applying electric shocks to some slaves for fun, and I mean, I don't want to look at this stuff too seriously, but still... yikes.

At least I got to look cute. I say that as someone who's not usually a fan of short races.

I also forgot that you start the experience with a temporary car and a lot of the intended fun seems to be in running people over. I guess Grand Theft Auto 4 must have just come out while they were working on this? Then you play this parody of American football and the implied joke is that you kicking a specially modified ball/bomb up the mountain is what unleashes Deathwing upon the world. It's just one bizarre scenario after another.

(Now, it was extra funny when I hit level 10 and got a call (?) from Ebyssian calling me a hero of the Horde and that I should go to the Dragon Isles while I was just fighting my way through a cave after having been shipwrecked. However, I'm more willing to be forgiving of content that is more than a decade apart not meshing well than of how weird the goblin starter zone was by itself.)

By the Lost Isles things started to feel like a real drag once again. You're locked into this hyper-linear plot that makes no sense and just has you endlessly running back and forth completing one joke task after another. Fetch an egg from a giant mechanical chicken! Blow up a shark with a laser! Mow down hordes of faceless pygmies with a mounted cannon! Wait, I thought we were shipwrecked and struggling to survive a moment ago? Oh look, the volcano is blowing up, get on this plane that we now have for some reason, time to dog-fight with some gnomes!

It's not that I didn't find any of it amusing (it had been so long I'd genuinely forgotten most of the story and I did at least crack a smile at the quest where a goblin captive in a cage barely has time to point out that their captors have keys before you start blowing things up with rockets instead), but it was just nothing but a succession of nonsense and I was definitely reminded of why Cata made me lose all interest in goblins and why I never had the urge to repeat this starter zone, ever.

In the run-up to patch 11.1, I saw multiple dev interviews where they felt the need to emphasise that they wanted the goblins to be more than joke characters in Undermine(d), and I'm glad to say that that's been true so far at least (the story is time-gated so I've only seen the first three chapters or so at this point). The same old stereotypes are still there, but we do see goblins caring about a variety of things and while there are still plenty of humorous NPCs and encounters, it's a lot more coherent and not just a bunch of random nonsense.

And yet, as I open yet another trash can filled with grey items that was marked as "treasure" on my Undermine mini map for some reason, I still can't help but wonder how we ended up here, with goblins speaking in New York accents and living underground among neon-lit filth. I mean, were they always meant to be like this and it just wasn't conveyed that well in the environmental storytelling in Vanilla WoW? Or if not, how and why did we get here? And did literally nobody but me find the way the goblin lore developed in Cata strange?

Happy (Character) Sorting Day!

I take a probably somewhat unusual pleasure in sorting things. I think it's something I inherited from my father, who was a "spreadsheet guy" before electronic spreadsheets were a thing. He was a collector of many things and he liked to keep them meticulously sorted. For example he used to record songs from the radio on cassette tapes, and movies/shows on TV on VHS tapes, and for both he kept detailed directories of what was stored where. Child me chose to imitate him by neatly cataloguing my own possessions, from my own cassette tapes to stuffed animals to books.

What does that little story have to do with WoW? Well, today's patch introduced a new option to sort your characters, and that delighted me so much that I haven't really gotten around to doing much else yet.

My "old mains" campsite, featuring (from left to right): the night elf priest that was my first ever character to level cap, the Horde troll priest who coined my online nickname of now two decades, the human paladin that was my first character ever, and the human monk that was my main throughout Shadowlands.

As a reminder, the introduction of Warbands in the War Within prepatch merged the character selection screens for individual servers into one big character selection screen. While most changes that have come with Warbands have been great, I thought this particular one was a bit of a mixed bag. At first, seeing all those old alts again was kind of cool and nostalgic, but in everyday play it got a bit annoying to have to deal with such a long list of characters. Sure, you could sort them, but there was still a lot of scrolling to do if you had a lot of alts like I do.

Well, since today's patch you can sort your characters into "warband camps" of up to four characters, which makes things a lot more convenient. I spent about fifteen minutes just creating groups and moving characters around before even logging in properly. My only disappointment was that you can't move the groups themselves around once created, so if you ever decide that one should move up or down, you have to delete/rename the existing groups and then manually shuffle the characters inside them as well.

I even took to reddit specifically to check out how other people were organising their campsites, and it's honestly been quite interesting. As you can see in the screenshot below, my own camps are primarily sorted by level progression and emotional connection. The ones named after servers are basically "those old Alliance characters from back when I played on Darkspear" and similar groups.

But other people took very different approaches. Some were sorting by play style (melee vs. ranged), some by class, faction or role (bank alts, crafters). Some came up with serious RP names, some with whimsical groupings like "might delete later". I just thought it was an interesting look into how other people view their stable of alts. 

Are you also an altoholic for whom this feature has been a godsend? If so, how have you sorted your alts into campsites?

Zekvir's Lair

If I recall correctly, Zekvir's Lair was promoted pre-expansion as being somewhat similar to the Legion mage tower challenges. I didn't play during Legion, and as I've stated previously, I'm generally happy to play at a somewhat more chill pace nowadays, but I do like a personal challenge occasionally. My personal journey to and through Zekvir's Lair has been quite an interesting one I think.

The husband and I didn't exactly rush to level cap, so it took a little while until we even considered visiting Zekvir's Lair for the first time. I think it was around the time that people were farming it to get quick vault credit for completing eight delves a week. If people are farming it eight times a week because it's easy, it can't be that much of a challenge, we thought. We went in together... wiped a few times on normal difficulty and then left again, deciding that clearly what we were doing wasn't working.

I decided to read up on the fight a bit and soon decided to give it another go by myself on my protection warrior, which quickly led me to success. Curious about how other classes/roles would fare, I then proceeded to do the fight on several of my alts as well.

As I levelled more characters to 80, it became a sort of tradition for me to have them fight Zekvir. It may not be that hard a fight on normal mode, but if you're someone like me, with a lot of alts you don't really know how to play, it pushes you towards learning a bit more about your class and spec. It won't teach you your optimised damage rotation, but it does encourage you to take a look at your action bar and figure out which buttons increase your mobility, which ones reduce your damage taken, and which ones temporarily increase your damage output.

At the time of writing this, I have all but one class at 80 (the slowpoke is my mage) and they've all done Zekvir's Lair on normal.  Even my crappy subtlety rogue, whom I still don't know how to play, got him down eventually, even though it took more than a few attempts. The point is though that you don't need to do great dps to beat him, you just need to figure out how to move and memorise both your offensive and defensive cooldowns, which I eventually managed to do.

I didn't give the hard mode much thought for the longest time. A guildie posted about beating it relatively shortly after the expansion launch, but at the time I didn't even know what the heck they were talking about so it didn't mean much to me. At some point I must have stuck my head in the door out of sheer curiosity, was probably killed by auto-attacks within a few hits, and decided that this was something to come back to at a later time.

With patch 11.1 creeping ever closer, I decided a few weeks ago that it was finally time to look into beating Zekvir on ?? difficulty properly (since there are feats of strength tied to doing so before the next season). I figured it couldn't possibly be too bad now with my prot warrior having geared up a bit to about 620 item level - but I failed horribly. I could just not do enough dps to get the egg down, and the slows from Zekvir's spit were also giving me trouble.

I decided to do a bit of research again, and while people had a number of tips for how to do better as a warrior, the general consensus seemed to be that the fight is a very different experience depending on your class and spec, and that prot warrior was one of the weaker ones for this particular challenge. Maybe I levelled all those alts for a reason after all, I thought... and decided to put them to the test.

I gave the fight a try on my warlock next. You may recall that warlock was another class that I didn't get on with while levelling... but when she hit 80, it was strangely as if somebody had flipped a switch and she suddenly turned super powerful overnight. I did an Awakening the Machine and everything absolutely exploded, even though I had no idea what I was doing. I tried Zekvir on normal mode and it was an easy one-shot, even though I had never even cast Demonic Circle before.

Giving Zekvir ?? a try on the lock didn't seem like that much of a stretch as a result. And I did feel immediately that it went a little better than on the warrior, but killing the first egg was still a bit hit and miss. Now, this character was actually around 35 item levels below the warrior, but I thought I had read somewhere that the fight scaled with gear anyway. I decided to double-check that, and it turned out to be wrong, so I took a break to do a bit of gearing up. I returned with an item level of just above 600, and my performance at egg killing did feel improved... but still not 100%, and other weaknesses of the class became more apparent now:

• Zekvir's melee attacks hit ridiculously hard, and as a clothie I would often die to random auto attack crits that had nothing to do with mechanics.
• My movement speed felt slow and I had difficulty dodging out of the deadly one-shot cones.
• While Demonic Circle worked to cleanse the snare from Zekvir's spit, it was only off cooldown for every other cast. Now, the theory here is that Brann in healer mode can cleanse the others, but his AI is kind of... inconsistent. I'd get the debuff, wait for a second to see if he'd cleanse, he didn't, and since it ticks for so much damage that you can't just wait around, I'd teleport back to my Circle, just to see his cleanse go off at the exact same moment after all... and then I had nothing for the next cast and would wipe. It just felt too unreliable and I found myself wondering whether there wasn't a class with an even better toolkit for this.

I eventually landed on windwalker monk, since this was a class/spec I actually felt I could play at a decent level. (I later read that ret pally might be even better, but my paladin is holy and I have no idea how retribution works at the moment.)

There was a bit of trial and error here too as I had to adjust my talents, but the experience immediately felt a lot better. With Tiger's Lust and no fewer than three charges of roll I had great mobility and didn't have to worry about Brann's skill at cleansing. Touch of Death made every other egg trivial to kill. However, progress still felt glacial, and after seeing comments that the recommended item level for hard mode Zekvir was apparently around 620 or so, I decided that more gearing up would still be helpful (I believe my monk was around item level 608 when I started).

So the next week I spammed bountiful delves pretty much daily. I had taken part in a lot of world activities but hadn't actually done that many delves, so I had dozens of keys saved up. It was remarkable how quickly I was able to get myself into a full set of champion gear, even while being dependent on RNG to an extent. I couldn't help but wonder if this was what my delve-loving guildies' experience of the expansion's early weeks had been. Aside from the delves, I also farmed valorstones wherever else I could get them, from buried wax and Siren Isle weeklies to world quests. After claiming my prize from the great vault the next week, I stood at a pretty solid item level 616.

And then I got serious about progressing the fight, parking my monk at the entrance to Zekvir's Lair and getting some attempts in whenever I had some time and could stand it.

This turned out to be... an experience. The extra gear meant that I was finally able to kill all the eggs almost all the time, but that didn't stop me from still finding other things to die to. It didn't happen nearly as often as on my warlock for example, but there were still times when Zekvir would just randomly crit with his auto-attacks and flatten me for no particular reason whatsoever. Sometimes I just failed to dodge a cone... usually when an add spawned on the little raised dais at the back of the room, which made moving to and from it less smooth. At other times, he just had to spawn an add at the complete opposite of the room and then cast every single ability to block my path consecutively. It felt so random and was infuriating.

Now, the truth is, there is a lot of randomness to the fight and you can absolutely get screwed over by RNG, but you can also mitigate some of those issues by just playing better. Positioning matters a lot for example - by keeping Zekvir in the middle of the room, the egg should never be too far away, no matter where he spawns it. But there was just so much going on in terms of dodging, running away, closing in again, finding where the heck Brann dropped his last set of health potions... it was exhausting and made me feel very old.

On Saturday I dedicated several hours to practising the fight, but quickly found myself demotivated. After more than fifty attempts on my monk it still didn't feel like I had made significant progress. Sure, I'd get into phase two every so often, but then I'd just wipe within ten seconds on the next attempt. It didn't feel consistent and like I was progressing at a good pace.

I thought about just abandoning the whole idea, but the sunk cost fallacy kept pulling me back in. Surely I hadn't spent all those hours grinding gear for nothing? Would I really have to go into the next season admitting failure after coming this far?

I kept looking for more ways to improve. I actually enchanted my gear and cooked some buff food, something I usually never bother with. I looked up a guide for how to dps as a windwalker - I thought it was interesting that every guide for Zekvir tells you that it's a marathon and not a dps race... but because you need to dance so perfectly for close to ten minutes, being able to shorten the fight even just a little, having one less egg phase and so on, made quite a noticeable difference to me.

I also decided that instead of banging my head against the wall for hours, I was going to limit myself to just a couple of attempts at a time, and then do something else for a bit, as I'd noticed that my first try of any given play session was usually the best, with my performance in subsequent attempts often deteriorating. By enforcing these breaks, I was able to make more attempts with a calm mindset and started to get to phase two more consistently.

The thing that killed me there most frequently were the "fucking fear balls" as I once swore out loud while my husband was looking over my shoulder. I even kept thinking about what an unfair mechanic they were, shooting out of his body at random angles at high speed, without giving you as much as a chance to dodge. Imagine my amazement when I finally realised that there was actually a visual indicator for where they would appear before they spawned, and that I could therefore dodge them reliably after all.

And today, it finally happened. I logged on in the early afternoon with the goal of just giving it one or two tries... and finally got him down after what must've been around 150 attempts across all characters over the last few weeks. My hands were shaking when the achievement finally popped, especially as I'd made a big mistake during the last few percent of the fight that had almost killed me.

I may be getting on in years but it's comforting to know that I haven't lost my reflexes completely yet, and I can still be unnecessarily stubborn as ever. I also feel properly ready for the patch now.

P.S.: The husband and I also did all delves on tier 11 over the course of the past few weeks. That was less of an adrenaline rush, but still required some care and patience at our item level, and I was still quite pleased with that achievement as well. According to Data for Azeroth, fewer than 1% of people have that achievement right now compared to 6% for Zekvir.

A Classic Player's Return to Retail WoW

Back in October I wrote a post about why I'm currently not playing that much Classic anymore, and I always meant for that to have a kind of part two, in which I talk a bit about why I am still playing retail and how I got back into it in the first place.

"How to get Classic players back into retail WoW" is a question to which I'm sure the Blizzard devs would love to have the ultimate answer... because while a subscription is a subscription regardless of which game mode you play, retail has extra monetisation opportunities that Classic lacks, which I'm sure makes it the much bigger earner of the two, regardless of what the actual player distribution might look like.

A few months ago I saw a YouTube video called "I Asked Over 400 Classic WoW Players Why They Don't Like Retail" and the most interesting thing about it to me was the conclusion, as the creator said that he'd originally intended to have a section about how to get Classic players interested into playing retail again, but gave up on the idea when the majority of the people he interviewed flat out said that nothing would bring them back to retail, ever.

I think this reveals that for many Classic players there's a strong emotional component to their dislike for retail, which also expresses itself in a sort of tribalism at times - I've found that in retail environments, nobody really cares if you also play Classic, but in pretty much all the Classic guilds I've been in, admitting that you also play retail is likely to result in persistent (if hopefully friendly) mockery.

I'm not being judgemental of that behaviour here either, because I was in the same boat only a few years ago. When I resubscribed for Classic, I had zero interest in ever playing retail again, and I shared several of the opinions expressed in the above video.

What changed? Well... the biggest and simplest draw to return to retail was curiosity. Having a single subscription for both was a pretty genius move by Blizzard in that regard, because I never would've re-subscribed to retail in specific, but since it was already part of my "subscription plan" so to speak, checking it out again cost me nothing other than giving up a bit of disk space after pressing the "install" button.

And I do suspect that this is something that has worked on other Classic players as well... the problem is that the initial experience you have upon returning is most likely pretty bad. Your natural reaction is probably to log back into the last character you played several years ago, which might have logged out in a location from multiple expansions ago, whose UI will be messed up, and which probably has a bunch of half-empty action bars. The game offers you a free teleport back to the capital nowadays, but I'm not sure how helpful that really is... I still dislike post-Cata Orgrimmar for example and always try to get out of there as soon as I can when playing Horde side.

Either way, even if you put up with the mess that greets you and try to make sense of it, the experience of trying to sort out what's what is likely to exhaust you and make you feel like the whole thing is just an awful chore. I remember that's exactly how I felt when I briefly logged into retail when I first renewed my subscription in the run-up to Classic's launch.

When I actually did start to play retail again, I did so by making an alt, a course of action which would also be my personal recommendation to you if you're a Classic player who's considering giving retail another try, even if you're not usually an alt person. It means that "chores" and elements of confusion come at you at a much more manageable pace, and you have a better chance of re-evaluating the game for what it actually is.

There are two basic strategies here from my point of view:

The first is what I'd call "the nostalgia route", in which you create a character of a race and class you like and start levelling them through familiar zones. While things are likely somewhat different from how you remember them from Classic, familiarity is going to outweigh strangeness, making it much easier to process the things that actually stick out to you as odd. I did this at first by creating a draenei shaman named Bluu and levelling her through the draenei starting zone, followed by having her go to Outland (this was before Burning Crusade Classic). I got a good shot of nostalgia out of the zones and quests, while pausing to be bewildered by things every now and then: Wait, they changed the intro cinematic for draenei, this makes no sense! Why does lightning bolt have no mana cost now? Why is the quest log weird like that now? What's up with the first aid trainer only teaching tailors now? Etc.

The risk with this approach is that you may run into one too many things that hurt your nostalgia after a while and sour your mood: elite quests that aren't elite anymore, barren landscapes where you remember bustling crowds, or confusion about where to go now that boats and portals don't work the way they used to. In addition, with the way scaling works nowadays, questing in old content means that you'll likely fall behind in terms of gearing and will eventually find combat increasingly awkward and drawn out.

Which takes us to the second approach, which is to still make an alt but almost with the opposite attitude: You know that trying to approach retail with nostalgia goggles creates problems, so you opt for a scenario where this won't be an issue, by creating a character of a race and/or class you've never played before, and jump into one of the more recent expansions that you know little to nothing about. This means that you'll be bombarded with more newness and strangeness than on the nostalgic path, but on the plus side, since you don't have expectations you shouldn't be disappointed by failing to have them met. Just read those quests and follow the markers and take in parts of the world you've never seen before. The slower trickle of information and features should still make the experience a lot more manageable than trying to get back to your old main instantly, and you'll get to explore a whole bunch of new content in the process. You can pick your old characters back up again later on if you want, when you're actually used to the UI again and have a better grip on how things work.

This is all under the assumption that you enjoy exploring and questing, which I would expect to be the case for a good chunk of Classic players at least. However, if you're looking to jump right back into group content and endgame, I'll admit that you'll have a tougher time and I personally wouldn't recommend it. Dragonflight and War Within have solo versions of all their dungeons at least, so you can check those out in a low-pressure way the first time around.

I will say that playing retail again hasn't suddenly "converted" me to thinking that it's the better version of WoW or anything. Here's a list of things I still prefer about Classic: 

• The way the whole world is relevant to some degree and how players interact with it by travelling a lot
• The slower-paced levelling and gearing and how it makes everything feel more meaningful, from your connection to your character and the ability to take in your environment to the excitement of getting a rare item drop
  
• The slower-paced combat with its simpler rotations and how it's more about being strategic about things like relative positioning to other mobs than about perfectly executing a complicated rotation
• The way being social is more integrated into general gameplay and the difficulty of just making progress in the world encourages you to co-operate with other players
  

Now, you might read that and go: Wait, what's even left for you to like about retail then? Well...

I think one major point is that I'm an explorer type, and while the Vanilla world is great, I've seen a lot of it by now (I know there are still some things I haven't personally experienced, but not a lot of them to be honest). In retail WoW, there are always new things to try out and new places to see, and since Dragonflight the devs have also made it a lot more rewarding to just cruise around the open world and explore. Nobody can tell me that the zone design isn't still top notch.

I also like how many casual activities they've added over time beyond just grinding dailies/world quests. I loved all the different recurring events they added during Dragonflight, from the communal soup cooking to the time rifts, and War Within has added more of these. They are little things that feel somewhat rewarding to do on pretty much every alt and are just plain fun. Classic has less of a variety of pre-made content: you either quest, do dungeons, raid or PvP.

Most importantly though, Classic is simply not getting any updates, the occasional experiment on a seasonal server not withstanding. Retail WoW is in a unique position in the MMO genre in that it's such a juggernaut with a huge budget, it's been pumping out new content like nobody's business for several years now. (It's fun to think back to when this game used to have "content draughts" of half a year or more. No longer an issue as it stands.) I love that there are always new things to do and new places to see, and even if not every single one of them is a banger, there's still a lot to love for players of all kinds of different persuasions.